Crooked Media - What A Day: Grand Central Defamation

Look, we’re all a little bummed that the settlement with Dominion Voting Systems has robbed us of watching Fox News humiliate themselves in a trial. But there’s still hope. 
 

• It’s clear that Fox News reached its $787.5 million settlement with Dominion at gunpoint, and the conservative news behemoth hadn’t initially planned on settling at all. Fox has gotten away with so much for so long that it’s clear they thought they could continue spreading lies with impunity. They probably thought they would win the trial, at least at first. But the evidence discovery phase ended up being such a disaster for them that once the reams of damning evidence came to light, they came to the table to stop the bleeding. 

• It may be too late. The settlement comes at a particularly inopportune time for them, as the network faces even more potential legal liability in a $2.7 billion lawsuit brought by Smartmatic voting systems. Smartmatic has invoked the Dominion lawsuit repeatedly in pre-trial actions, and now they have even more gas in the tank since Fox has been forced to publicly admit wrongdoing. That only bolsters Smartmatic’s claims that Fox should be legally on the hook for their disinformation.

• Smartmatic and Dominion have a lot of overlap in their cases, as the two companies were often lumped together by Fox in false on-air allegations, among them the lie that Dominion used Smartmatic software to rig the 2020 election. The network also suggested Smartmatic’s software was not just inherently flawed but had been made deliberately vulnerable to hacking. In fact, Smartmatic was often portrayed as the true means of stealing the election, especially by former Fox News host and all-around MAGA lunatic Lou Dobbs. Obviously, none of this was true. There was no evidence that Dominion even used Smartmatic’s software.

So where does that leave Smartmatic?
 

• Well, they seem to be in extremely good shape, as it were. Back in February, a five-judge panel unanimously found Smartmatic’s legal arguments adequate to continue its lawsuit alleging that Fox and its talent knowingly aired conspiracy theories they knew were false or about which they had considerable doubts. 
   

• On April 12, the company filed an order with the New York State Supreme Court to compel Fox to hand over “all relevant documents and depositions” from the Dominion lawsuit, as previously directed by the court. As of the date of that filing, Fox had produced fewer than 7,000 documents out of more than 52,500 documents that they turned over to Dominion for its lawsuit. It’s also interesting to note that Smartmatic’s technology, while being ferociously targeted by Fox News, had only been used in the Los Angeles County 2020 election, and therefore could not have had any impact on a national election, certainly not in swing states. 

Smartmatic has a lot to feel confident about going into their lawsuit. As Stanford Law School defamation expert Robert Rabin said, “some of the claims endorsed by Fox commentators are so preposterous on the surface that, taken together with the overlapping discovery materials from the Dominion suit, it appears that Smartmatic has a very substantial case.” Other such experts have called it “even more compelling as a David-and-Goliath argument to put before a jury.” Smartmatic lawyer Erik Connolly said on Tuesday after the Dominion ruling: “Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest.”

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They’re just…not even hiding it anymore! On Saturday, longtime GOP lawyer and fundraiser Cleta Mitchell gave a presentation at an RNC donor retreat in Nashville.  There, she told a room full of craven psychos with deep pockets that conservatives must make a concerted effort to limit voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration, and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters. A copy of her presentation was obtained and reviewed by the Washington Post and included more than 50 slides called “A Level Playing Field for 2024” in which Republicans are seeking to “level the playing field” by disenfranchising as many people as possible. Mitchell worked closely with disgraced former president Donald Trump, and the GOP has not formally endorsed her plan, but yeah, voter suppression is pretty squarely in their wheelhouse. According to audio obtained by the Post, Trump privately told donors at the RNC that he eventually wants to end all voting by mail and early voting, because both skew heavily Democratic.

Pulitzer Prize-winning digital news website BuzzFeed News will shut down according to chief executive Jonah Peretti.

Fox News has ended its relationship with MAGA-head Dan Bongino, one of the biggest proponents of the Big Lie on the network, who hosted the hilariously-titled Unfiltered with Dan Bongino and Canceled in the USA (now canceled).

The GOP-controlled House approved legislation that would bar transgender women and girls from participating in women’s sports. The bill has virtually no chance of passing the Democrat-controlled Senate, but it’s not great, folks! 

If you can suspend your disbelief, it appears that Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) are failing to attract small donors, and are instead disproportionately relying on corporations and big-money individuals like none other than conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow, according to new FEC filings. 

The U.S. military is moving more troops to Djibouti to prepare for a possible evacuation of American Embassy staff in Sudan, where bloody fighting between two warring generals had led to swift deterioration in the country’s capital city of Khartoum. 

A grandchild of Andrew Lester, the 84-year-old homeowner who shot Ralph Yarl after the Black teenager mistakenly went to the wrong house to pick up his brothers, said Lester had become obsessed with watching conservative news and following right-wing conspiracy theories in recent years. You don’t say!

Rep. Scotty Campbell (R-TN), one of the Tennessee state legislature’s GOP leaders, who led the charge to expel three Democrats from the body for protesting gun violence, was recently found guilty of sexually harassing at least one legislative intern, likely two, by an ethics subcommittee. He resigned later in the day. Please don’t confuse Campbell with David Byrd (R-TN), the child molester who was also a Tennessee State Representative until this year.

Billionaire megalomaniac Elon Musk has touted SpaceX’s Super Heavy as the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, and on its maiden test flight today, it blew up within minutes, taking the attached vehicle, the Starship, with it. The rocket initially gained speed, but then started to spin at altitude after the rocket failed to separate from the cruise vessel, and exploded about four minutes after leaving the ground. It’s not clear whether the rocket exploded spontaneously or the Flight Termination System was activated. The rocket was uncrewed, but it was designed to eventually carry up to 100 astronauts, so this seems pretty bad! Regardless, Elon Musk and SpaceX have chosen to spin the explosion as a good thing, a “learning experience” and even came up with a rosy euphemism for explosion: “a rapid unscheduled disassembly.” You can dress it up all you want, babes, but the rocket still exploded almost immediately after takeoff. And for it to have happened on the same day that Twitter ended legacy verifications and fully implemented a new paid subscription that essentially makes verification worthless? It’s poetic.

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The Minnesota State Senate just passed an omnibus Health and Human Services bill that will expand the state’s healthcare plan with a public option, which will greatly expand affordable health coverage to Minnesotans. 

Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Dick Durbin has officially invited Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts to testify before the committee on May 2 following the revelations of (ahem) certain justices breaching ethical expectations.